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A Minecraft Movie (2025)
I was fully prepared to dismiss A Minecraft Movie as junk for its target audience, and then a funny thing happened in fact pretty early in the movie: I was laughing. Then I laughed again. Genuine laughter. I’m here to say that the Minecraft movie is not the silly and stupid kid’s movie you may have dreaded. It’s actually a pretty pleasant fantasy adventure movie that, while aimed for kids, can still be enjoyable for like-minded adults looking for some colorful and silly escapism. It’s hip to be square, baby.
Steve (Jack Black) is a guy who loves to create, and mines for whatever reason, and finds a portal to another very cube-centrist world. In this new world, Steve finds friends and freedom, but this is ruined when a nefarious force comes through wanting to conquer this new world as well as Steve’s home world. He sends out help and seals off a portal. Years later, a pair of siblings, Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers), move into Steve’s old home and discover his portal, along with an middle-aged arcade game champion and local legend, Garret (Jason Momoa), and realtor, Dawn (Danielle Brooks). These newcomers must adjust to this strange world and defend themselves against zombies, creepers, and other dangers. Fortunately, Steve serves as a valuable guide, but can they all defeat the evil forces?
There’s a robust silliness to Minecraft that invites you to not ever take things too seriously and have fun with the vibes. Much like the Super Mario Brothers adaptation, there isn’t really a story to adapt here. There were several moments that felt like it was a satirical parody of the fantasy adventure movie while also working as examples of fantasy adventure tropes. Refreshingly, much of the humor is not derived from fish-out-of-water juxtaposition. This could have easily been a “Well, that happened” kind of nonchalant comedy, holding up the weirdness to scrutiny for easy yuks. It finds better jokes through pushing further than simple observational irony (“My dad says math has been debunked”). It’s good-natured humor that keeps things positive and goofy, channeling the open-sandbox creativity of the video game. Its “be yourself” message is easier to accept than more disingenuous kid’s movie junk like The Emoji Movie. The Minecraft world is presented less as a purchasable video game rather than a new world to explore that rewards exploration (during daylight hours). The very enemy of the movie is a sorceress (voiced by Rachel House) that hates creativity and sees it as a waste in her pursuit of always plundering and hoarding more gold. I might be reaching but there seems even like a possible A.I. reading there, with our giant pig sorceress standing in for tech bros who are trying to eliminate avenues of creativity because all they care about is wealth and cannot understand the appeal of creativity. The movie has several little comic asides that caused me to chuckle and laugh and smile, and I looked over at my adult friend beside me for my screening, and his response was the same. We both had been surprisingly taken by the genial silliness of this movie.
Black (Jumanji) has become a kids’ movie juggernaut thanks to his zany energy and willingness to go above and beyond no matter the request. He’s a charming and delightful performer by nature, whether he’s voicing an animated character or singing a sexually explicit song about all the positions he will execute. He dips out for the first half hour after the exposition dump that opens the movie, but once he’s back on screen, it’s easy to remember there just isn’t another actor like Black. He’s funny and completely bought-in with whatever the movie asks for, but every single line and every single gesture is at a ten. He is selling every second of this movie and I can completely understand why some people just might get overstimulated by Black’s histrionics. You can tell the filmmakers were like, “We want our own version of ‘Peaches’ to go viral,” and so we get three different moments of Black singing original songs. This aspect was the most transparent and contrived decision that felt based upon chasing after the success of another movie popular with the kids. The actor I enjoyed the most was Momoa (Fast X) who has lots of fun undercutting his own masculine image and his character’s over-inflated ego masking his insecurity.
The visuals are bright and enjoyably retro. The Minecraft video game is famously low-grade with its pixelated graphics, more akin to the visual landscape of video games from the 1990s than 2011 when it was first published (it has since become the best-selling video game of all time). Starting with that visual scheme, it allows the movie to be good looking without having to be photo-realistic with its CGI. We have a stylized world to explore that’s full of vibrant colors and characters. This is easily the best looking movie of director Jared Hess’ (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) career. His skewed sensibilities work as a nice fit with the comic direction of the movie, and there are some engaging visual arrangements.
Regrettably, this adventure is a bit of a boys-only club. The female half of our adventurers don’t really get the attention that the boys do. Both Natalie and Dawn sit out for long stretches of the movie that I forgot they were in the movie. Usually, these kinds of stories make it so each character has some kind of arc that can be fulfilled by the end, even if it’s minor. I suppose you might be able to argue that Natalie is learning to accept the responsibility of being a parental figure to her younger sibling, and Dawn getting the gumption to quit her job to pursue her dream of running a petting zoo. I’m not keen on bestowing credit for just having a scene at the end where the characters celebrate whatever their goals had been. If you don’t see the work and the development toward those goals, then you don’t get the credit. Why can’t these women have their own adventure that meaningfully connects to the larger plot? Or, even better, why can’t they also go along and contribute to the quest along with all the boys? It’s not like I think the movie is actively trying to downplay the role and importance of women, but it’s also disappointing that there are clear tiers of the characters as far as what kinds of fun and story integration they ultimately earn.
Behold, the Gen Alpha cultural epoch and its name is “chicken jockey.” By now you may have heard of this infamous scene that has caused some theaters to erupt in a calamity of noise, rowdy behavior, and throwing a live chicken at the screen. I even had a theater employee warn our audience before the movie began what is acceptable behavior and how people not abiding by these expectations would be removed from the theater. I’ve been watching movies my entire adult life and other than special screenings for movies intended for audience interaction, like Rocky Horror and The Room, I have never had a theater employee warn me about proper decorum, and this was before the Minecraft movie. It’s astounding. What’s also astounding is how ultimately meaningless this moment is. It’s a baby zombie that falls atop a chicken and rides it, and from what I’m told, this is a very rare occurrence in the game, but I guess it means something more to a generation of fans relishing a rare reference in their favorite game. While I was standing outside the restroom waiting for my own kid to return, a little girl was impatiently asking her father if he was done using the restroom, much to his growing annoyance. “Please hurry. I don’t want to miss the chicken jockey part,” she explained in desperation. I’m happy that this moment seems to be so highly anticipated for millions of fans, but as an outsider, this moment feels so incidental and flimsy that it would be like a generation excitedly waiting for Indiana Jones to lean against one particular wall.
This movie could have been so much worse, and the fact that it’s relatively breezy, funny, and entertaining for non-fans of Minecraft, such as myself, counts as a success in my book. It’s telling that the title is A Minecraft Movie and not The Minecraft Movie. It is but one story in this universe, and given the popularity, it will surely not be The Last Minecraft Movie. Its runaway success at the box-office means we’re probably headed for even more Gen Alpha-centered game adaptations, like some Roblox game you’ve never heard about if you’re over the age of twenty. Hey, it all might work somehow. This one did.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Borderlands (2024)
I’ve never played the popular looter-shooter video game that Borderlands is based upon, but I have to say that the fan base certainly deserved more than a low-rent combination of Guardians of the Galaxy merry pranksters with Mad Max freakazoid wasteland gangs. You can clearly tell the specific X-Meets-Y of the pitch, although apparently writer/director Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, The House with a Clock in the Walls) was auspiciously inspired one day by, literally, watching his dog squat over and poop and said, “This, this has to be in the movie.” So, from those noble creative origins comes a movie that labors so hard to be breezy and fun but feels so gassed and desperate. In this future sci-fi universe, there’s a special planet that is populated with different space crooks and gangs all fighting to discover a hidden vault of legend. The world is overrun by masked marauders known cheerfully as “psychos.” There’s also a prophecy about a chosen one, a kidnapped daughter to a very dangerous man, and Jack Black voicing one of the most obnoxious sidekicks in recent memory. That’s the thing about Borderlands: everyone is obnoxious or trying badly to be so indifferently cool. It doesn’t work. Cate Blanchett is not the right fit for the lead character of Lilith, a blase bounty hunter/for-hire killer that finds herself gathering a band of bickering bandits. The movie wants us to see them as a dysfunctional family of lovable losers, but each mediocre character is distilled to an underwhelming essence of quips, snark, and stylish killing. If there was a whiff of personality to be had with the different characters, their different and conflicting perspectives, this universe and its interesting locations for world building, even the unique weapons and fighting abilities, there might be even some fleeting entertainment to be had. Alas. It’s not funny. It’s not exciting. It’s not visually appealing. It’s not interesting. It’s not surprising. It’s just sort of loud with capital A-attitude and a forced sense of jocular PG-13 whimsy. It’s not… a lot of important things. Instead, Borderlands only makes me reflect how much better James Gunn has proven himself with these kinds of funky found families.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Tetris (2023)
The “real” story behind the addictive puzzle game is an engaging tale of underdogs and corporate intrigue that might prove surprisingly fun and complicated for such a simplistic and straightforward game. We zoom back to the late 1980s and two converging storylines: the rise of handheld gaming and the decline of the Soviet Union. Taron Egerton (Rocketman) plays Herk Rogers, an American businessman living in Tokyo with his wife and family who has put all his hopes on the Japanese license rights of a small little game made in Russia. What follows is one man trying to finagle a system of questionable IP rights between scheming businessmen and Soviet KGB agents. The numerous players fighting for dominance over the course of legal copy, meeting rooms, and offers and counter offers was, for me, the most entertaining part of the movie, and the version that felt the most tethered to reality. There are some Hollywood exaggerations in this retelling, especially in the final act where the movie takes a cue from Argo and has its heroes in a careening car chase to get to the Moscow airport and eave the country (externalizing the internal feelings, much like Argo). Since we all know that the game ultimately ends up as one of the best-selling and most iconic, and packaged with the launch of Nintendo’s GameBoy, the appeal of the behind-the-scenes story is the struggle that our heroes overcome, and Tetris succeeds through its accessible but ever-moving plot mosaic that feels like legal knots trying to come undone. I think the movie gets even better when Herk becomes friends with Alexey, the state worker who created the game in his spare time and is hassled by KGB agents for the game harming national productivity. There are a few too many cutesy touches the movie could do without, like the inclusion of 8-bit sprites as visual transitions, something that is layered over the climactic car chase making it look much duller. I also feel like the honeypot twist feels a little too overinflated Hollywood drama for its own sake. There’s already plenty of drama here that didn’t need the help. Regardless, Tetris is a solid drama that stacks up.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Uncharted (2022)
The successful Uncharted series (2007-2016) are some of the most movie-ready video games for big screen adaptation. While playing the globe-trotting, puzzle-solving, treasure-hunting action-adventures, it feels very much like you’re already in the middle of a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. The game was in development for so long that the producers have finally ditched Nathan Fillion, the celebrity doppelganger in look and attitude of the game’s swashbuckling protagonist Nathan Drake, and resorted to everyone’s favorite web-slinger Tom Holland as a younger version of the hero. He’s a brainy bartender who is looking for some hidden Magellan treasure, and maybe his missing older brother too, and is aided by Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), an Army vet with a shared goal of retrieving the gold before his rival, wealthy industrialist Santiago (Antonio Banderas). It’s a race against time and while it doesn’t reinvent the action-adventure wheel, Uncharted is a perfectly diverting piece of entertainment. The banter is fun between Holland and Wahlberg, the action set pieces are brisk, and the third act in particularly is just a showstopper of big action bravado. The visuals are eye-grabbing and the action sequences are inventive and exciting. That’s what Uncharted gets the most right, that sense of fun the games have built into their core, while keeping things moving smoothly with colorful characters and large-scale action. You’ve seen some combination of this movie before, but even genre masterpieces are built from their influences, so being derivative is not a fatal flaw as long as the filmmakers get the essentials of storytelling and action cinema right, and they do here. The world of video game movies is already one where the bar is fairly low for quality, but it seems like Hollywood has started raising its game, like with the new Tomb Raider, Detective Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the upcoming Last of Us prestige HBO series. Count Uncharted as the Saturday morning popcorn spectacle that knows exactly how to deliver a good time in only 105 minutes.
Nate’s Grade: B
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X (2022)/ Choose or Die (2022)
Horror is likely the most forgiving genre out there for being derivative. Just about every modern horror movie wears its many influences, even the recent trend of elevated horror movies that are trying to say Big Things with equal amounts of arty style and bloodshed. There’s only so many monsters that can chase so many teenagers. Ti West (House of the Devil) is a director I haven’t fully enjoyed, though I would say X is his most accomplished film to date for me. It’s clearly going for a Texas Chainsaw Massacre vibe and docu-drama aesthetic. It’s set in 1979 and we follow a ragtag film crew trying to make “a good dirty movie.” They’ve rented a guest house in the middle of nowhere Texas as their film site because who knows. The octogenarian couple who owns the farm property doesn’t seem to approve of these young folk, and the old lady ends up becoming the slasher killer that mows down the randy young adults. Turns out the old lady has her own urges that the old husband is no longer physically able to satisfy, so she seeks out solace one way or another with the newcomers, whether that be through her sexual satisfaction or through violence. To West’s credit, he has given more attention to his characters. These people are not going to be confused with three-dimensional figures but there’s enough character shading that made me more interested in spending time with them and a little more rueful that most of them will probably die horribly soon enough (Chekhov’s alligator). The slow burn is not wasted time or dawdling, and there are some very well-executed squirm-worthy moments of discomfort. I don’t think X quite works on that elevated horror level of late; it’s mostly a slasher movie with a dollop more complexity and style. The real reason to appreciate X is from the dual performances from actress Mia Goth (Suspiria), the first as a stripper-turned-ingenue that sees pornography as a path of possible self-actualization, but she’s also secretly the killer old lady under piles and piles of makeup. Her wild performances, including scenes where she is facing off against herself, makes the movie far more interesting. Goth goes for broke. I don’t think the X is as fun as it thinks it is, nor is it as thoughtful as it thinks it is, and I don’t know if I care about a prequel that was shot back-to-back that illuminates the killer old lady’s younger life. Is this character really that interesting to warrant her own movie? As a horror movie, it’s disturbing and bloody and surprising in equal measure even as it doesn’t do much with re-configuring the many conventions of its genre.
Netflix’s Choose or Die is one of those spooky horror movies that wants the audience to play its deadly games alongside the unfortunate characters, much like Saw and Would You Rather?, and I typically enjoy these kinds of movies and thinking what options or strategies I would undergo if I was in their place. The structure is pretty straight forward, with a young woman (Iola Evans) and her programmer friend (Asa Butterfield) coming across a cursed old school text-based computer video game that forces its users to make awful choices. The game turns itself on every 24 hours, so there’s a natural delivery of set pieces, each increasing in its personal stakes. There’s the amateur investigation of the history of this 80s video game and uncovering the possible owner who might be benefiting from all this cruelty and sadism. This is a movie built around its set pieces and they start strong. When the protagonist sees the game in action, with a poor diner worker force-feeding herself broken pieces of glass, it’s truly horrifying and the sound design makes it so much worse. The movie isn’t s gory as it could have been and implies a lot more than it shows. The problem with Choose or Die is that there are too many leaps in logic and characters doing silly things just for the sake of the plot. There needs to be an established system of rules or else everything will feel arbitrary, and eventually that is what dooms Choose or Die. Even while we get more of an explanation behind the makers of the game and their occult connections it never feels like we’re better positioned to beat the game. I will say the final act, the Boss Battle, is where the movie cranks things up and gets really intense and darkly humorous. There’s a showdown that involves a key concept of self-harm that plays out in moderately clever, bizarre, and surprising ways, and this splashy, silly finish made me wish the rest of the movie could have lived in this tonal space. I found the overall sound design to be very annoying as it cranked up the volume on lots of glitchy electronic noises that just made me want to turn it off. There are some good ideas here, like the criticisms of being too nostalgic to the past, and of misogynist men believing nobody else is deserving of being the hero of their story, but this is a movie that lives or dies on its killer set pieces, and those just fall flat after its unsettling first level. Watching someone vomit VHS tape is not scary. Watching people move their bodies like they have no control over them will inherently look goofy. Choose or Die wouldn’t be the worst choice of a movie to kill 85 minutes but it’s certainly not much more than the sum of its parts, and even those are overly derivative and been done better by its predecessors.
Nate’s Grades:
X: C+
Choose or Die: C
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Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)
While not as enjoyable as the first outing, Sonic 2 mostly fulfills what you would be looking for with a sequel. This is the kind of kids movie that is aimed primarily for the little ones, and that’s okay, not every movie intended for children has to work on multiple levels of maturity. We follow our signature alien speedster as he meets two of the other famous faces from the video game franchise, Tails (voiced by the game’s original actress) and Knuckles (Idris Elba), except Knuckles is working with a returned Doctor Robotnik (Jim Carrey) to find a hidden gem of ultimate power. The plot is just a disposable excuse to set up some big screen adventure-seeking, and everything is kept at a very low-stakes realm of entertainment, breezy and quippy and pleading with you to just accept it on its own minor terms. At points, the Sonic sequel can feel like a direct continuation of its predecessor and Carrey is once again the MVP. I enjoyed the Knuckles character because the screenwriters have made this new alien warrior very much like the literal-minded himbo, Drax (Guardians of the Galaxy). Plus I just enjoy Elba’s natural British voice. The length of the movie is a bit padded at over two hours, a full twenty minutes longer than the 2020 original, and the attempts at heart feel strictly boilerplate and perfunctory. The subplot about a destination wedding in Hawaii feels included just to give the humans something to do away from the action, and while I enjoyed Natasha Rothwell (Insecure) getting to go full avenging bridezilla ham, this stuff could have easily been cut as much as it matters to the bigger picture of world-saving and robot-smashing. If you were a fan of the first Sonic movie, which I found to be a pleasant surprise, then you’ll likely relive those same feelings but just a little less potent. It’s still a fun, agreeable kids movie and one that can be enjoyed on that level even by adults, though the fun just might not be the same size as before.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Werewolves Within (2021)
Surprisingly based upon a PlayStation VR video game by Ubisoft, Werewolves Within is a fun horror comedy that plays out like a demented Agatha Christie drawing room mystery. Sam Richardson (The Tomorrow War) is a new park ranger assigned to a small snowy town that may or may not be threatened by a werewolf hiding among the townspeople. A series of bloody murders and mangled gas generators points toward some monstrous beast, and over the course of one long night, characters will accuse one another of being the hidden werewolf, and tensions and paranoia mount as the body count rises. Part of the fun comes from the wild whodunit speculation that the filmmakers are aware of. Early on, I started accumulating my band of suspects, and then my red herring suspects, and the movie seems to be fully knowledgeable of this as well, so there’s plenty of little details spilled that, in an ordinary movie would prove conclusive to the detail-oriented viewer; however, Werewolves Within is full of motivations and clever fleeting details to throw you off. Richardson is wonderfully nonplussed as the supremely nice and easy-going ranger who finds himself frantically trying to be the voice of calm and security as the town breaks down. The supporting characters are rather one-note nutjobs but each has a different personality to sprinkle into the chaotic mix. The eventual reveal of the culprit involves a lot of explaining to cover hidden character deception that could have used more setup to feel less forced. I also wished the humor and the horror was a bit crazier. I knew the horror wasn’t going to be pronounced, as most horror-comedies typically favor one more than the other, but I wished the comedy had escalated as the characters further gave in to the insanity of the ridiculous situation. It’s a movie that’s easy going in charm and finely punctuated with some sharp one-liners and silly visual gags. It’s agreeable to its core and a lighthearted yet gory way to spend 90 minutes. By default, it’s also one of the best video game adaptations made into a movie. That’s primarily because it’s a recognizable murder mystery structure just with a genre kick. I wish everything had been given an extra dose of elevation and hijinks, comedy and horror, but that might detract from the overall droll charm, lead by Richardson. Werewolves Within makes me wish for an anthology franchise just transplanting its premise across new settings. Imagine The Hangover but having to also figure out which of your recovering blackout drunk friends was a werewolf. It just works.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
When the first footage of a live-action Sonic was unleashed, it became the Internet’s new nightmare, until the Cats trailer was released. The strange, unsettling design made the classic Sega speedster just creepy to behold, and you could count his baby teeth in his human mouth. The producers did something unheard of in response to the onslaught of negative criticism — they listened. They redesigned the character to be more akin to a familiar 3D model from the games and delayed the movie several months in order to accommodate the special effects time crunch. The new and improved Sonic the Hedgehog movie benefits immensely from this redesign, though I routinely kept imagining what the original nightmare-inducing design would look like at different points in the film (a side-by-side DVD special feature, eh?). This is a kids movie very much geared toward that audience but I was mostly charmed by the inclusion of Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) into our world. He’s paired with a straight-laced small-town cop (James Marsden) and given a road trip to retrieve his portal-creating magic rings. Jim Carrey plays Dr. Robotnik, a mad scientist hired by the U.S. military to find and capture the alien responsible for the mysterious power surges. Carrey’s unrestrained, intense physical performance is a nostalgic delight for 90s kids who grew up on his rubber-faced silliness, and he often made me laugh through sheer force of personality alone. However, I appreciated that the screenplay actually shows effort. There are sly, unexpected jokes that didn’t have to be there and yet the filmmakers didn’t rest on their laurels. I enjoyed the buddy dynamic between Sonic and Marsden and the more mawkish moments didn’t make me gag. It’s not anything groundbreaking or operating on higher levels of sophistication like Pixar, but it’s a generally enjoyable and brisk experience that’s colorful, fun, and accessible to Sonic fans and non-fans alike. Perhaps this will signal a new age where studios are more beholden to the demands of a noisy fanbase, and perhaps that’s not exactly the best thing moving forward for art. But it worked in this instance. The fans won.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
Think of this action-comedy sequel as the enjoyable DLC to 2017’s main campaign. The Next Level feels rather familiar as it dishes up slight variations on what made the 2017 Jumanji reboot so enjoyable, namely a game cast ready to be silly and physical, fun and flourishing action set pieces, and a clever satire of video game mechanics. The excuse to get the gang back together one year after events from the first film is flimsy, but I didn’t care because I enjoyed these characters and especially the actors playing their in-video game avatars. The twist this time is a body swap that involves two elderly men (Danny DeVito, Danny Glover) joining the mix, allowing The Rock to do his best… old Jewish man impression? It certainly doesn’t come across like DeVito, as funny voices isn’t exactly a specialty for The Rock, but it hardly matters. There’s still more worlds to explore, new obstacles/levels to be tackled, and with the body-swap mechanic, a fun switch-up for the main actors to portray a variety of characters inhabiting their bodies. I was extremely happy that the film rejected recycling jokes from its predecessor. It would have been very lazy (a.k.a. lazy) to simply go back to a few funny wells that worked the first time, but every time the film brings back an element from the first adventure it builds off of it rather than rehash a reference point. Once again Karen Gillan (Avengers: Endgame) steals the show. The humor isn’t as gut-busting or satisfying as the previous incarnation but part of that is because we now know what to expect from this renewed franchise, and The Next Level manages to deliver what a fan would request while finding enough variations and tweaks to make it feel like its own movie, even if it won’t live up to the high standard of entertainment that came before it. If you were a fan of 2017’s Welcome to the Jungle, I’m confident you’ll walk away relatively satisfied and smiling from The Next Level. However, chart this as another movie that ends with a preview of a sequel that I wish I had seen instead of the movie I got (stay tuned through the immediate end credits). Jumanji: The Next Level is a worthy sequel to one of the more fun, clever, and visually inventive action-comedy franchises. As long as they can maintain this level of quality, I’ll happily pre-order the next edition.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Detective Pikachu (2019)
This may be my least useful review in my career as a critic but I’ll try my best when it comes to Detective Pikachu. I’m not a Pokemon fan. It came to popularity as I started high school and was generally after my time. I can state unequivocally that this movie is not made for people like me, and that’s fine. I imagine fans of the long-running television series and games will be delighted to see this world brought to life with great care and top-notch special effects. I sat through the 105 minutes slightly amused but feeling no strong feelings one way or another. It’s a pleasant enough movie with decent world building and a predictable plot (taken verbatim from the game of the same name apparently). It’s charming enough for an outsider but offers not much else. It feels like a PG-Deadpool Ryan Reynolds attached to a Who Framed Roger Rabbit?-style universe where Pokemon and humans interact normally. No one ever seems to fully articulate how the Pokemon battles are essentially dog fighting and that they’re enslaving these creatures for blood sport, but it’s not like I was expecting that commentary either. In a world of living monsters, the human characters are a bit boring. Justice Smith’s character is annoying and inconsistent. He seems a bit oblivious to how much he remembers about his missing father, which is more curious with some end reveals. Bill Nighy appears as the most obvious villain. Suki Waterhouse is here as a shape-shifting hench woman. The real draw is Reynolds as the voice to a Pikachu looking to pick up the pieces of its lost memory. The humor is brisk and has more hits than misses, even if the aim is somewhat low. Detective Pikachu is a family-friendly comedy that will likely please the hardcore legion of Pokemon fans and leave the rest of us shrugging our shoulders and saying to ourselves, “Well, that was a thing.”
Nate’s Grade: B-
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